Rochelle Mason Fine Arts

My Background

My Inspiration

With my love for animals and an interest in medicine, I began a career as a Registered Veterinary Technician. I saw such incredible beauty in anatomy and physiology. Shortly thereafter, my "real career" as an artist blossomed and I was creating paintings of dogs, cats and horses for international clientele. After several years I decided to focus my original artwork on raising awareness about endangered species with a particular focus on overlooked and unappreciated animals. In the late 1990s I began exhibiting my paintings in natural history museums in the US, UK and Switzerland and writing my weekly newspaper column entitled Focus on Nature.

My Inspiration

Teddy, my feline companion, was my muse and inspiration for the Wildcats of the World series and my mom was the inspiration for the Beyond Eden abstract series of original paintings.

My mom taught me the most valuable lesson about animals when I was young: "respect them and learn from them". At the time, I was dealing with a spider.

Knowing most people don't like animals such as snakes and spiders and bats and bugs, it became my personal mission as an artist to help people see nature's beauty, understand its value, and hopefully transcend "speciesism".

My Mediums

My Inspiration

My Mediums

Oil paints have really helped me grow as an artist, especially while painting the Wildcats of the World traveling exhibition and Beyond Eden series. Earlier in my career I used the soft pastel medium to paint the California's Endangered Species and Hawaii's Endangered Species traveling exhibitions along with hundreds of dogs, cats and horses commissioned by private collectors.

I've also challenged myself by moving from realism to abstraction, which has been a wonderful journey of discovery.